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arXiv:2110.02098 · Quantum

Thermometry of Gaussian quantum systems using Gaussian measurements

Marina F. B. Cenni, Ludovico Lami, Antonio Acín, Mohammad Mehboudi

Published Jun 23, 2022• 26 citations
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Abstract

We study the problem of estimating the temperature of Gaussian systems with feasible measurements, namely Gaussian and photo-detection-like measurements. For Gaussian measurements, we develop a general method to identify the optimal measurement numerically, and derive the analytical solutions in some relevant cases. For a class of single-mode states that includes thermal ones, the optimal Gaussian measurement is either Heterodyne or Homodyne, depending on the temperature regime. This is in contrast to the general setting, in which a projective measurement in the eigenbasis of the Hamiltonian is optimal regardless of temperature. In the general multi-mode case, and unlike the general unrestricted scenario where joint measurements are not helpful for thermometry (nor for any parameter estimation task), it is open whether joint Gaussian measurements provide an advantage over local ones. We conjecture that they are not useful for thermal systems, supported by partial analytical and numerical evidence. We further show that Gaussian measurements become optimal in the limit of large temperatures, while {on/off} photo-detection-like measurements do it for when the temperature tends to zero. Our results therefore pave the way for effective thermometry of Gaussian quantum systems using experimentally realizable measurements .

DOI
10.22331/q-2022-06-23-743

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Abstract The central issue in quantum parameter estimation is to find out the optimal measurement setup that leads to the ultimate lower bound of an estimation error. We address here a question of whether a Gaussian measurement scheme can achieve the ultimate bound for phase estimation in single-mode Gaussian metrology that exploits single-mode Gaussian probe states in a Gaussian environment. We identify three types of optimal Gaussian measurement setups yielding the maximal Fisher information depending on displacement, squeezing, and thermalization of the probe state. We show that the homodyne measurement attains the ultimate bound for both displaced thermal probe states and squeezed vacuum probe states, whereas for the other single-mode Gaussian probe states, the optimized Gaussian measurement cannot be the optimal setup, although they are sometimes nearly optimal. We then demonstrate that the measurement on the basis of the product quadrature operators X^P^+P^X^\hat X\hat P + \hat P\hat XX^P^+P^X^ X ̂ P ̂ + P ̂ X ̂ , i.e., a non-Gaussian measurement, is required to be fully optimal.
We present a quantum thermometry scheme based on a cavity-QED setup, which attains a sensitivity with Heisenberg scaling. A stream of identical two-level systems passes through a thermal bath to be tested. Each system partially thermalizes, carrying information on the temperature of the thermal bath, and it then interacts with a dissipative single-mode cavity. The Heisenberg scaling is attained from the initial coherence of each system. The systems cannot be fully thermalized by the thermal bath. The optimal interaction time between the system and the thermal bath is derived. Direct photon detection is proved to be an optimal measurement when there is no extra thermal bath in the cavity. In the case where there is an extra thermal bath in the cavity independent of the thermal bath to be tested, homodyne detection is the optimal measurement. Moreover, we show that direct photon detection obtains less information in the case where the extra thermal bath in the cavity is in thermal equilibrium with the thermal bath. However, the optimal measurement can utilize the information from the extra thermal bath to improve the estimation precision of the temperature.